You can proactively monitor your website or API endpoints with synthetic monitors. Depending on the type of monitor, you can:
- Add and edit monitors.
- Use our NerdGraph API or the synthetics REST API to manage monitors.
- Set up monitors from specific locations or for private servers.
You can also use the host not reporting feature in infrastructure monitoring. This allows you to take advantage of enhanced monitoring options and be notified when New Relic has stopped receiving data from your hosts.
Types of monitors
These are the seven types of synthetic monitors:
Type of synthetic monitor | Description |
---|---|
Broken links monitor API name: | Provide a url and this monitor will test all the links on the page for success. If a failure is detected you can view the individual non-successful links that caused the failure. |
Certificate check monitor API name: | Proactively ping your domain certificates based on a configurable threshold. Pair with an alert to ensure you are notified when your certificates need to be renewed. |
Ping monitor API name: | Ping monitors are the simplest type of monitor. They simply check to see if an application is online. The synthetic ping monitor uses a simple Java HTTP client to make requests to your site. For consistency with other synthetic monitor types, the user agent is identified as |
Step monitor API name: | Step monitors are advanced monitors which require no code to set up. The monitor can be configured to:
|
Simple browser monitors API name: | Simple browser monitors essentially are simple, pre-built scripted browser monitors. They make a request to your site using an instance of Google Chrome. Compared to a simple ping monitor, this is a more accurate emulation of an actual customer visit. The user agent is identified as |
Scripted browser monitors API name: | Scripted browser monitors are used for more sophisticated, customized monitoring. You can create a custom script that navigates your website, takes specific actions, and ensures specific resources are present. The monitor uses Google Chrome browser. You can also use a variety of third-party modules to build your custom monitor. |
API tests API name: | API tests are used to monitor your API endpoints. This can ensure that your app server works in addition to your website. New Relic uses the |
You can add and edit synthetic monitors directly in our UI. You can also create some synthetic monitors with Terraform. To learn how, watch this short YouTube video (approx. 3:25 minutes).